A Birmingham native, she grew up in
in Ensley in the 1950s and 1960s in an African-American family with 14 kids.

That why she became irritated in recent
years when she heard network pundits on Fox
and CNN and MSNBC pontificating about poverty, and about poor people, without
any personal experience to back it up.

People who live in poverty get "a bad
rap," Johnson said during a recent visit to Birmingham. She has lived in Tallahassee since she got her first teaching job there in 1971.

"People are looking at them as if they
were lazy, had criminal attitudes and had nothing good to give, and they were
there because they wanted to live like that and live off food stamps or the few
dollars they get in public assistance," Johnson said. "A lot of these people
don't understand how little the public assistance dollars are and that no one
would want to live that way to get those dollars."

But Johnson is driven by a desire to
challenge these attitudes, and to argue for the value of unions and of public
education in helping people have safe standards of living and work their way
into the middle class.

While in Birmingham, Johnson said that she had
spoken to student assemblies at Council Elementary School and Jackson-Olin (formerly
Western-Olin) High School in Ensley, both of which she attended. Johnson visited
the faculties at some local colleges, including Lawson State, and made appearances on TV
and radio.

Johnson said she knew that many of the stereotypes
about the poor -- for example, that they want to be poor or like living at the bottom
-- were lies.

"Growing up in poverty I know that isn't true,"
she said, summoning the memory of her parents, who were not well-educated but
worked hard to provide for their kids and give them a better life.

"My mom was a maid who worked long hours who
cleaned not just at home but the homes where she worked," Johnson said. "My dad
worked in the Docena coal mines and worked the grave yard shift a lot of times."
According to Johnson, her father had his hands crushed and permanently injured
by a coal car.

Johnson points out that many of the poor who
people pontificate about actually work and work hard. "They are just working at
such minimum wages they
can't earn enough money to take care of their families on what they earn," she
said.

A desire to challenge these attitudes
is one reason that Johnson, after her retirement last year, decided to write a
book.

In Poverty, Politics, and Race: The View from
Down Here, which she has made available at amazon.com, Johnson said she describes
her upbringing in Birmingham, the turbulent civil rights era, and what she sees
as the open racism that has resurfaced since the election of Barack Obama as America's
first African-American President.

She also discusses economic inequality,
environmental justice, the importance of supporting public education, unions
and their role in creating America's middle class, the faith community's role
in a civil society, and the politics of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The book project seemed to come at just the
right time, Johnson said, after her years in advocacy, education and politics.

"My life
seemed to come full circle from the poverty I grew up with in Ensley to ending
my career in working for an agency for the poor," she said.

Johnson retired in May after 14 years as
Executive Director of the Capital Area Community Action Agency in Tallahassee,
Fla., which is dedicated to helping the poor in an 8-county area.

"I had the benefit of seeing and knowing the
stories who were coming to us and seeing how hard they were working to try to
dig their way out and understanding the grave importance of the safety net
program that some in (Washington) D.C. were trying to eliminate," Johnson said.

Johnson also wanted to speak out about racist attitudes
that persist in American society and politics.

''It was really scary over the last few years,"
she said. "I could see signs of how easily, if things went one way rather than
another, we could lose ground back to the 1960s -- the voter suppression tactics
during the elections, recently with a lot of the things that are being done to
stymie school success and kill off public schools"

Johnson was also disturbed by what she sees as
the blatantly racial tone of a lot of the rhetoric about President Obama.

"I wrote a column in my local paper how in
this day and time, this blatant racial animus being expressed in light of the
election of Barack Obama is being excused so easily and being talked about as
if it were just a difference of opinion, but people don't express a difference
of opinion in those ways," she said. "That is not civil discussion when you
paint a picture of the president of the United States as as a monkey or as
Hitler and you want to use Second Amendment remedies and you are against
anything that he stands for."

Johnson graduated from Clark College (now
Clark/Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Ga., in 1968, with a major in education
and a minor in art.

She worked as a teacher for 28 years, with the
last 19 at the K-12 School at Florida State University.

Johnson's life and career were also driven and
enriched by her lifelong activism. According to Johnson's book, her mother was
an organizer for car pools during the civil rights movement and made sure her
children were involved in the sit-ins, marches and pickets as teenagers.

It was this activism that led her on an unexpected
path in Tallahassee beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a school
teacher in Tallahassee beginning in 1971, she said she fought for equitable
funding for inner-city schools and eventually ran for school board.

She became active in the local Democratic
party and became the first African-American woman elected twice to the
Tallahassee City Commission. She served two terms as mayor, from 1989-1997.

Johnson became the director of the Capital
Area Community Action Agency in 1998.

She said that she wishes more resources were made
available to improve the neighborhoods near Jackson-Olin and Council, and those
in other neglected areas of the city. "Just looking at the deplorable
conditions of the housing, there doesn't seem to be anything being done to improve
those living conditions," Johnson said.

"This is always going to be my hometown but
when I come back and I go to the neighborhood where I grew up, I am
disappointed," she said.

The appearance of these areas is particularly
painful, she said, given how nice some areas look, such as Hoover, Homewood,
and Southside near UAB. "It's like two different cities," Johnson said.

Johnson has also worked through the years to
promote legal services, affordable housing, children's issues and historic
preservation. She has spoken at several national conferences on urban design
and livability. She is a member of the Florida Arts Council and is a visual
artist.

She visited Birmingham with her husband, Lee
Johnson, a minister and businessman.